


Yanked by the Red String of Fate

by FriendofCarlotta



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Pre-Canon, But mostly fluff, Crack Treated Seriously, Dean Winchester and Castiel Are Soulmates, Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Idiots in Love, John Winchester's A+ Parenting, M/M, Red String of Fate
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-19
Updated: 2020-07-19
Packaged: 2021-03-04 18:48:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,239
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25371148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FriendofCarlotta/pseuds/FriendofCarlotta
Summary: Thirteen-year-old Dean Winchester is seconds from being run over by a speeding truck when something yanks at him. The next thing he knows, he's miles away, in a cornfield.Being pulled out of danger by an invisible force becomes a regular thing for Dean after that. Sam develops this crackpot theory about soulmates and something called the "Red String of Fate," but Dean doesn't buy it... until the night the hellhounds come for him.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Comments: 51
Kudos: 335





	Yanked by the Red String of Fate

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nickelkeep](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nickelkeep/gifts), [super_powerful_queen_slayyna](https://archiveofourown.org/users/super_powerful_queen_slayyna/gifts).



> This idea started as a prompt on the Profound Bond Discord server (where you should [join us](https://discord.gg/profoundbond) to scream about Dean and Cas) and kind of took on a life of its own. I decided I wanted to turn it into words, and here we are. I hope I've done it justice.
> 
> The "Red String of Fate" (sometimes referred to as the "Red Thread of Fate") originates in Chinese mythology. The idea is that destined lovers are connected by an invisible red cord around their fingers. (I changed fingers to wrists for purposes of this fic, because being yanked around by your finger just sounds awful.)
> 
> A big thank you to [tiamatv](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tiamatv/pseuds/tiamatv) for her awesome beta job. She always makes my words so much better. You should give her fics a read, too!
> 
> Enjoy this bit of sappy fluff :) .

The first time it happens, Dean is thirteen.

To be honest, thirteen is already a really damn confusing age. There’s hair growing in places where there wasn’t before, there’s a lot more BO, and he’s constantly popping boners for no reason. (OK, fine, there’s usually a reason. But about ninety percent of the time, it’s still not really freaking convenient.)

Anyway, Sam’s asleep and, for once, their dad’s around, so Dean figures he’ll walk down the street from the motel and see if the local convenience store has a Ms. Pac-Man machine.

The store’s on the other side of the highway from the motel, and Dean’s just started to walk across when a rusty old truck comes barreling down the road, going at least fifty. It doesn’t have its headlights on, so by the time Dean notices it’s there, it’s almost right on top of him.

Which is when Dean feels something _yank_ at his wrist.

From one second to the next, everything becomes a blur. He’s moving so fast, all he can see is colors, and the wind in his ears is nothing but a high-pitched whine. 

It lasts so long, Dean’s starting to seriously worry that this is just his life now. Maybe he died, and this is what happens after?

(That would really suck.)

Eventually, though, the movement stops.

Now he’s just sort of hanging there. He’s fifty feet above the ground, suspended by _something_ that’s got a hold of his wrist but is totally, completely invisible.

And wow, fifty feet is really high up. Dean’s already feeling sick to his stomach from being yanked around at hyper speed, and he’s just so _done_ with this whole thing.

“Put me down?” he tries.

Instantly, he’s lowered, ever so gently, onto the ground.

After he’s thrown up his dinner of boxed mac-n-cheese, he takes a look around. He’s in the middle of a cornfield. A cornfield where? Or how far from where he’s supposed to be? Who knows.

It takes Dean two hours to so much as find the highway again, and another hour to figure out he’s been going eastbound along the side of the road, when he needed to be going _westbound_ to get back to the motel.

By the time he makes it back to the room, it’s 3 a.m. and his dad is livid. Dean mumbles some excuse about losing track of time while he was playing Ms. Pac-Man, and John imposes a blanket ban on arcade games for the next six weeks.

Fucking unfair.

***

Three months later, Dean’s put the weirdness out of his mind. He’s got a weird life, and weird shit happens in it. No big deal.

Yeah, right.

That night, John takes him on his first hunt — it’s a werewolf, but it isn’t part of a pack, so apparently, his dad figures this’ll be a good chance for Dean to earn his spurs with an easy kill.

Except it turns out the werewolf has two buddies they didn’t know about, and the buddies are closing in fast.

His dad’s fighting two of them at the same time, but the third one has Dean backed against a wall. He’s got nothing more than a silver knife to defend himself with, and his hands are shaking.

The werewolf looks unimpressed, its claws reaching for Dean and yellowed canines glinting in the flickering, sickly light of the abandoned warehouse.

Just as those sharp claws make a swipe at Dean’s throat, he’s yanked into the air, jerked all the way across the warehouse and returned safely to solid ground, all within the span of about two seconds.

Thanks to nearly a decade’s worth of hunter instincts, John recovers from this unexpected development more quickly than either of his opponents, and he decapitates them with a single swipe of his silver machete.

Then, he turns to Dean. “The fuck just happened?”

“Um.” Dean shrugs. “Must’ve been the werewolf?”

John scoffs. “One thing I know for sure: werewolves can’t do _that._ ”

Before Dean can explain, the third werewolf, still in the game, barrels past John and charges at Dean again.

It’s maybe three strides away when there’s a tug at Dean’s wrist and he feels that sensation again — colors and noise and everything becoming a blur.

By the time it finally stops, he’s in the parking lot of a Walmart… somewhere.

It turns out “somewhere” is about thirty miles away from the warehouse, and Dean’s dad has to come pick him up from a police station the next day.

Dean doesn’t even get in trouble this time, but John shoots him sideways glances every so often for the next two months. 

***

As Dean gets older, he starts carrying around regional maps in his back pocket at all times.

It’s kind of annoying having to switch them out every time they move on to a new place, but Dean learned his lesson after that one time he got yanked to the middle of Yellowstone with a map of Albuquerque.

Sometimes, he doesn’t get yanked for months. Sometimes, it happens two days in a row. The only common denominator seems to be that it happens whenever he’s in immediate danger of dying. You’d think, now that he’s really starting to live the life of a hunter, he’d be in mortal danger all the time. But whatever the hell is doing the yanking seems to know what he can and can’t handle. So, on the whole, it’s not so bad.

Well, except for the part where John always looks at Dean now with that slight glint of suspicion in his eyes. Every so often, he’ll bring back a stack of dusty lore books that he refuses to let Dean look at. Of course, Dean knows exactly what his dad’s doing anyway, because he’s tried to do the same research at local libraries and in the private collections of John’s hunter friends all over the country.

Basically, there’s no evidence that what’s happening to him has ever happened to anyone else.

*** 

Their first solid lead, if you want to call it that, actually doesn’t come from John or Dean. It comes from Sam.

Dean and his dad have this unspoken agreement not to bring Sammy into the loop, because he doesn’t need to worry about that shit. That works until the night before Sam’s eleventh birthday, when Dean gets yanked two states over after he almost falls down a sinkhole on a ghoul hunt. 

He’s gone for three days, and Sam _knows_ Dean would never miss his birthday if he had any other choice.

Dean deflects and denies with everything he’s got — which is plenty — but Sam won’t be deterred until he gets a play-by-play of the entire situation.

A week later, Dean's sitting on a crappy old couch in their latest motel room, half-heartedly watching _Jeopardy_ , when Sam taps him on the shoulder.

“Dean, have you heard of the Red String of Fate?”

“Nah. What’s that, some kung fu movie?”

Sam huffs out a sigh that’s awfully world-weary for a kid who still sleeps with a teddy bear. (Not that he wants Dean to know about that. He always hides the thing under his pillow. But Dean knows.)

“No, Dean.” Sam drags Dean away from the couch and to the nearby table, which has a whole avalanche of library books spread across it. Dean wonders when Sammy even had time to sneak out and get those, the resourceful little bastard.

He lets himself be shoved into one of the chairs and watches while Sam pulls open a book filled with Chinese characters and pictures of a red string connecting two people by their wrists. 

“So get this,” Sam says, pointing at the illustrations. “In a lot of Asian cultures, people believe that the person you’re supposed to be with is bound to you by the ‘Red String of Fate.’”

“Uh-huuuh,” Dean drawls. “Love for learning is great and all, but why are we learning about _this_?”

Sam glares at him with all the force an eleven-year-old can muster which, honestly, is quite a lot. “Would you just listen?”

“Would you just get to the point?” Dean sasses, but he softens it with a smile.

“Fine. So your soulmate is basically attached to you by this string, and it’s the thing that keeps you connected until you can finally meet them. When you die, the string gets severed.”

“Soooo…” Dean flails his hands at Sam, because clearly, the point of all this is still miles away.

Sam rolls his eyes. “Here’s the thing. Everybody assumes it’s just a metaphor, right, for some kind of soul connection with your future spouse? But what if it’s a real string, and _your_ soulmate figured out how to use it to keep you from dying before you could meet them?”

Dean gapes at his little brother for a solid ten seconds before he kicks his shin under the table. “For _this_ you made me miss _Jeopardy_?”

*** 

Some guy once said you should accept the things you can’t change, so Dean just kind of accepts that he occasionally gets yanked places. Sometimes, it’s twenty feet to the right. Sometimes, it’s halfway across the country.

In any case, life goes on. Sam grows up, John drinks more, and, eventually, Sam runs off to Stanford. Instead of sticking with Dean after that, John goes off on his own more and more often.

Occasionally, Dean thinks back to that conversation about the Red String of Fate. What if there really is someone out there for him — someone who’s meant to be his spouse or soulmate or whatever? It’s stupid to let himself believe it, but it’s the closest thing he gets to a human connection most days.

So maybe he starts going on risky hunts by himself, just to see if he’ll get yanked again. And he does, more and more often. A few times, he’d swear he gets yanked extra hard, like the person at the other end knows exactly what Dean’s doing and is really fucking annoyed with him for it.

When John goes off on yet another solo hunting trip and stays AWOL for longer than usual, Dean heads to Stanford to get some help tracking the old man down.

Sam’s life goes to shit after that — his girlfriend dies, and instead of going to law school, he’s back on the road with Dean. Dean kind of hates that he did this to his brother, but he hates even more that he’s just so fucking glad he doesn’t have to be alone anymore.

Which is why, when Sam gets stabbed by that asshole Jake and dies in Dean’s arms, yeah, he’s not about to stand for it. 

He heads to the first available crossroads and makes a deal for his soul to bring Sam back. Actually, he’s kind of surprised he doesn’t get yanked halfway through, but he doesn’t. Maybe it’s because he’s not in any danger of dying (for now).

One year later, it’s a different story. Dean’s standing in some suburban family’s living room in Indiana, a white haze of panic fogging his brain, when the clock strikes midnight and two hellhounds come busting through the door.

Dean closes his eyes as he waits for the agony of being torn apart by razor-sharp teeth.

But it doesn’t come.

Instead, there’s a sound that can only be described as a “rustle.”

The air in the room shifts, and even the hellhounds stop in their tracks. Facing them, and with his back to Dean, is a guy in a trench coat. In one fluid, graceful motion, he falls to his knees and grabs hold of a hellhound with each hand. Blinding blue light bursts from his palms, so bright that Dean puts up an arm to shield his eyes.

When he lowers it again, there are two dead hellhounds, one extremely confused Sam — Lilith apparently got out while the getting was good — and… the guy.

He turns to face Dean, and all Dean can see is _blue_. Big blue eyes, practically electric even in the pale glow from the streetlights outside.

“Hello, Dean,” the guy says.

Then he raises his wrist and he _yanks_.

*** 

When the world stops spinning, Dean’s standing in some kind of barn, dimly illuminated by a handful of buzzing lamps suspended from the ceiling. The barn’s mostly empty, except for a few pieces of rusty, dust-covered farm equipment along the walls.

Dean shakes his head to clear it, willing his brain to provide him with something he can use to make words. It comes up with anger.

“Who the _fuck_ are you?” he demands.

“I’m Castiel, but you may call me Cas for short. The book said you would.” The guy, Cas, is squatting halfway across the barn from Dean, studying a decrepit old plow with a completely disproportionate amount of interest. “I remember when these were used. They were very cumbersome to operate. Human farming technology has really come a long way since I was last down here.”

The weirdly abrupt change of subject notwithstanding, the mere sound of Cas’ gravel-deep voice warms Dean’s chest from the inside out. He can't remember feeling like this since the days when he used to watch Sam sleep and sometimes push a curl of hair gently off his forehead.

To cover up this decidedly sappy reaction, Dean crosses his arms and widens his stance.

“Hey, focus,” he snaps. “I meant, _what_ are you? Clearly, you’re not human.”

“Oh.” Cas looks up from the plow, straightens and turns to face Dean. Wow, he really does have _very_ blue eyes. The 5 o’clock shadow and messy dark hair are kind of working for him too. “I’m an Angel of the Lord.”

Dean scoffs. “Yeah, right. There’s no such thing.”

“I’m happy to demonstrate.” Cas’ eyes narrow, and from one second to the next, the light bulbs suspended above him burst, bathing him in a rain of sparks. Instantly, the barn is illuminated by an eerie blue light, and two giant shadows rise along the wall behind Cas. 

They’re shaped like… wings.

“Holy crap,” Dean mumbles, just before the lights come back on, the bulbs magically restored.

He might spend another second or two just staring at Cas, but then Dean catches himself and defaults back to his standard setting of surly and aggressive. “And why would an _angel_ rescue me from hellhounds?”

For the first time, Cas looks a little embarrassed. “I got impatient.”

Dean blinks, once, twice, not totally sure he heard that right. “You... what?”

“I got impatient,” Cas repeats. “I knew we were connected by the Red String of Fate, so we would have met eventually. But it was taking a long time, and I was getting a little tired of having to save you from life-threatening situations without ever revealing myself.” He shuffles his feet a little, and Dean could swear the guy was hiding a blush. “So I snuck into the room at the center of Heaven where the Book of Fate is kept. It tells the stories of how fated lovers are supposed to meet.”

Dean chokes on his own saliva so hard, it takes him a good two minutes of coughing and wheezing to recover. Cas doesn’t offer any reaction other than a mildly concerned, “Are you alright, Dean?”

“ _Lovers_?” Dean’s still catching his breath, which is what he’ll tell anyone who tries to question why the hell his voice is coming out all squeaky.

“Yes. I believe I already mentioned that we’re connected by the Red String of Fate.” Cas raises his wrist, and Dean feels an ever-so-slight tugging on his own before an actual red string manifests in the air between them. It’s fastened around Dean’s right wrist and Cas’ left. The string flickers for a second, and then disappears.

“Humans can’t usually perceive the string,” Cas rumbles. “But as an angel, I can see it, manifest it and manipulate it. In any case, my point is that only those destined to spend their lives together are connected by a string of this kind.”

Dean can’t deal with any of that, so he backs the conversation up a few steps. “So, the… the book you read. What did it say?”

Cas’ eyes narrow again, and a deep frown line appears between his eyes. When he speaks, he sounds furious. “It said you were meant to go to Hell, and that I would be the one to pull you out, four months from now.” Cas strides across the barn until he’s right in front of Dean, so close that Dean instinctively shrinks back a little. Which is weird. He _never_ backs away from a challenge.

Cas tilts his head, fixing Dean with those insanely blue eyes. “Time passes differently in Hell. You would have been down there for forty years.” Looking agitated now, Cas starts pacing up and down in front of Dean. “And then, even after our first official meeting — in this same barn — we were supposed to dance around each other for more than a _decade_ before we finally managed to so much as share a kiss.” He throws up his hands in obvious frustration. “It sounded _exhausting_. So I decided to ignore the Book of Fate and speed things up.”

Dean takes a second to go over everything Cas said, trying to find some little nugget of sense he can latch on to. “Won’t you get in trouble? Screwing around with what the Book of Fate says is supposed to happen, or whatever?”

Cas just looks at him for a few beats, his face expressionless. “Yes. I doubt I’ll be allowed back in Heaven after this.”

“Alright, well,” Dean growls, shoving down the little twinge of guilt he feels before the next part has even left his mouth. “Thanks for saving my life and all, but this is too freaking weird. Just get me back to Sam and leave me the fuck alone.”

He feels a yanking at his wrist, and in a blur of colors and high-pitched sound, he’s back in Indiana. He grabs a still extremely confused-looking Sam and frog-walks him to the Impala without a word of explanation.

*** 

Of course, Cas turns out to be an extremely difficult fucker to get rid of.

He pops up in the Impala’s backseat about ten minutes into their drive. (At least that's a short reprieve from the constant stream of “What happened, Dean? Who was that guy? Where did you go? Seriously, Dean, I need you to talk to me here” that he’s getting from the passenger side.)

After Dean yells at Cas to get lost, he does. 

But he’s back again as soon as they’ve checked into their motel room, just popping up next to the minibar.

Sam nearly falls off his chair. “OK, who the hell _are_ you?”

Cas gives him a small, pleasant smile. “My name is Castiel. I’m—”

Before Cas has a chance to introduce himself as Dean’s “fated lover” or something equally cringe-inducing, Dean interrupts him with some extremely choice words, which include telling Cas to do something to himself that probably isn’t physically possible even for an angel. After that, Cas peaces out again, looking more than a little disgruntled. 

Two minutes later, he gives Dean a yank that lands him in the middle of a muddy construction pit three miles away. Dean doesn’t have his phone on him, so he has to walk, boots squelching the whole way.

The next time Cas shows up, Dean’s taking out a vampire nest with Sam. Dean’s got his own vamp under control, but Sam’s fighting two at the same time and he’s struggling. Just as he’s managed to decapitate one of them, the other uses the moment of distraction to go right for Sam’s jugular.

Dean barely gets out a useless shout of warning before Cas is there, grabbing the vamp around the neck and hauling him off Sam. Cas puts his palm to the vamp’s forehead, blinding light streaming from his palms until the vamp sinks to the floor, eyes reduced to black, smoking pits.

The three of them stand there, just looking at each other, Sam and Dean both breathing heavy and Cas looking completely unruffled.

“Alright, you can stay,” Dean mumbles.

*** 

After that, Cas comes with them everywhere they go. He goes on hunts with them and stays in their motel rooms at night, watching over them while they sleep. (At first, Dean tells him to “face the other way or watch TV or something. It’s creepy.” By a few weeks in, he doesn’t bother anymore.)

Dean figures Cas will stop yanking him around now that they’ve officially met, but no such luck. During one particularly hairy hunt, Dean almost gets pushed out a fourth-floor window by a vengeful spirit. Instead, Cas whisks him all the way to a beach in California.

He has to call Cas five times before he finally picks up.

“Hello, Dean,” he rumbles from the other end of the phone line.

“What the fuck, Cas? I’m in California!”

“Oh. My apologies. I meant to send you only a few miles away. The string is very difficult to manipulate, especially when I’m distracted by other matters. As a result, my aim is somewhat erratic.”

Dean pinches his nose between his thumb and forefinger, trying to hold in the litany of curses he still kind of wants to hurl at Cas, life-saving intervention be damned.

“Alright, look, pal. Next time, could you at least, I dunno, yank Baby along too so I have a ride back?”

Cas’ eyeroll is practically audible. “Baby is an inanimate object, Dean. I’m not connected to her. Only to you. In any case…” Cas pops up right next to Dean, grinning, and Dean does not _yelp._ He _doesn’t_. “Now that the hunt is finished, I can simply transport you back to Baby.”

So he does.

*** 

Cas has been around for a few months now, and Dean finally admits to himself that he’s a little curious about this whole Red String of Fate thing. So he asks about it, one night over drinks with Cas at a dive down the street from their latest motel room.

“So I can’t be the only person in the world with a…” He blushes a little and hides it by taking another swig of his beer. “A soulmate, or whatever. How come people aren’t getting yanked out of dangerous situations all over the place?”

Cas smiles that soft little half-smile he only ever seems to use on Dean. “Humans can’t control the string because they can’t see it. I can.”

“OK, I remember that part, but still. What about all the other humans with angel… soulmates?”

“There aren’t any.” Cas shrugs and shifts a little on his bar stool to get more comfortable. After being cut off from Heaven for screwing around with the Book of Fate, he’s been slowly losing his powers and adopting more human mannerisms, including fidgeting. It drives Dean up the wall. “It’s highly unusual for a human and an angel to be connected this way. I don’t believe it’s happened since Babylonian times.”

“Huh.” Dean sits in silence for a few minutes while he sips his beer. That’s one of the nice things about Cas. They don’t _have_ to talk when they’re together. They can just… be. “Hey, Cas?”

Dean’s heart tries its hardest to leap out of his chest when Cas hums quietly and looks over, giving Dean his full attention — just like he always does. Dean’s been working his way up to asking this question for a while now, and he might be a little nervous. “What if I never wanna be… that way… with you?”

Cas frowns at him, looking adorably confused. “What way?”

“You know… you said we were fated, um…”

“Oh.” Cas nods sagely. “Fated lovers. You’re talking about sex.”

“Well, yeah,” Dean admits, blushing furiously.

Cas leans in closer, and Dean’s heart beats impossibly faster. Holding Dean’s gaze, Cas says into the ever-dwindling space between them, “I’ll take whatever you’re willing to give me, Dean. Whatever you decide, I won’t leave your side unless you ask me to.”

Cas leans back to wave at the bartender for another round, and Dean almost leans in after him. 

Okay, maybe this whole idea of having sex with Cas isn’t as crazy as he always told himself it was.

*** 

One day, another couple of months later, something is really, really off about Cas.

He’s been sleeping more lately and he usually wakes up grumpy. But this morning, he doesn’t say a word even after he’s had his usual three cups of morning coffee.

Dean shrugs off his unease — the guy’s allowed to be in a bad mood if he wants — and heads to the bathroom for a shower.

(When Cas first realized he needed to sleep now, Sam started getting a separate room whenever they stopped for the night, so that Dean and Cas could share. There’s nothing wrong with it, OK? It just worked out that way.)

Twenty minutes later, Dean steps out of the bathroom, all dressed and ready for the day. Cas is still just sitting at the table where Dean left him, hunched over his empty cup, and he’s… 

Is he _crying_? 

That can’t be right. Cas _never_ cries.

Except when Dean steps closer, there’s definitely a tear track running down one of Cas' cheeks. Dean has an immediate, visceral reaction to get his hands on whoever or whatever caused this and punch it.

Instead, he reaches out a tentative, slightly shaky hand to grip Cas’ shoulder and give it a squeeze. “Um… what’s going on there, buddy?”

“It’s the string, Dean,” Cas croaks, and he looks so utterly defeated that Dean instinctively squats down next to his chair, just to get closer. “I can’t see it anymore.”

“You can’t…” Dean stops, realizing what this means. “So… you’re not an angel anymore? You’re all the way human?”

Cas nods, and another tear sneaks down his cheek. “If I can’t see the string, Dean, how will I know where you are? How will I keep you safe?”

Up until this moment, Dean never did totally believe in the whole Red String of Fate business. Sure, Cas actually showed it to him back at the barn, but that could have been some kind of illusion. 

But now… now Dean feels _something_ tugging at him, pulling him irresistibly toward Cas. His wrist moves of its own accord until he’s touching Cas’ face, wiping the tear off his cheek with a gentle thumb.

And still, he keeps being pulled irresistibly closer, until his lips are touching Cas’ and moving slowly against them.

Immediately, the tugging lets up, replaced by a simple sense of _rightness_ that flows from the tips of his toes to the roots of his hair. 

They stay like that, kissing softly, until Dean stops being able to feel his legs. When he rises off the floor and winces a little at the sensation of pins and needles, Cas follows. He wraps his arms around Dean’s middle, a solid, warm source of support, and they move to the bed, their limbs hopelessly entangled.

They undress each other, unhurried and without a word. Every touch is a question, but the answer is always _right there_ , in the bone-deep feeling that this is what they were meant to do all along.

*** 

Now that Cas has lost his mojo, it’s quickly becoming apparent that hunting is a whole lot harder when you can’t just be yanked out of life-threatening situations. After the third time one of them almost dies at the hands of some two-bit monster, they decide to retire.

They head up to Sioux Falls, where Sam helps Bobby expand the scale of his hunter network and lends a hand with research. Dean lands an apprenticeship as an auto mechanic in town — which he’s way overqualified for, but hey, at least he’s getting paid honest money — and Cas gets a job labeling inventory at the local library. Dean figures it’s got to be mind-numbingly boring work, but Cas seems to like it, and a couple of years in, he’s promoted to head librarian.

It doesn’t take long for Bobby to get tired of catching Dean and Cas making out in his broom closet, so they look around for a place of their own. They find it in the shape of an old farm two miles from Bobby’s scrapyard. Dean likes it immediately because it has a barn that kind of reminds him of the night he first met Cas.

A couple of years later, they get married. It’s probably not totally legal, because they both have to use fake names on the marriage license. (Dean’s still technically a wanted felon, and Cas… well, Cas doesn’t even have a last name.) Anyway, it works for them.

Sometimes, when they get stir-crazy, they take Baby on the road and just keep driving until they get someplace. The Grand Canyon. The world’s largest pineapple. The Atlantic Ocean.

But mostly, they stay at their little farmhouse in Sioux Falls, sitting on the porch and watching first Sam’s kids and then his grandkids play on the swing set Dean built.

One night, they’re on the porch by themselves, occupied with one of their favorite rituals: drinking Cas’ famous iced tea and planning the list of chores for the next day. It doesn’t sound like much, but they’re both retired from their second careers now too, so this is as exciting as it gets anymore.

Cas is squinting down at his handwritten list. Based on the birthday Dean made up for him decades ago, Cas is well past seventy, but he’s still refusing to get reading glasses. “Dean, I need you to drive me into town so I can pick up some more potting soil. We really should get those seeds in before it gets too cold. Oh, and you’ll need to pick up the spare part for the sink that’s still dripping and get that installed. I’d try to fix it myself, but you might remember what happened the last time I tried that. We’re never going to get those stains off the ceiling. Oh, and one other thing…”

He looks up and blinks, apparently realizing that Dean hasn’t raised a single objection or at the very least made an obnoxious comment. Which, yeah, is out of character for him. But right now, he’s too busy watching Cas be in his element, content and focused. The dark of his hair and scruff has given way to grey, but his eyes are as blue and sharp as ever, and Dean loves him.

Instead of saying that — Cas knows, anyway — he grins. “All this time, and you’re still yanking me all over the place.”

Cas looks extremely offended. “I’m hardly…” He huffs. “Dean, these things need to be taken care of in a timely manner, and…”

Dean levers himself out of his rocking chair, grin widening until his face hurts with it. “C’mon, sweetheart. Let’s go inside. Been a while since we got naked.”

He winks as lewdly as possible, lifts up his wrist, and he _yanks_.

Sure, he knows it doesn’t actually work like that, and Cas isn’t about to be magically transported out of his chair and up to the bedroom, but the point is this: Cas chuckles, throaty and rumbling, and he walks right into Dean’s waiting arms.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! If you liked what you saw, leave this needy writer a comment or kudos!
> 
> Also, come find me on [tumblr](https://friendofcarlotta.tumblr.com).


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